The shop sign of the art dealer Gersaint
The shop sign of the art dealer Gersaint ( French L'Enseigne de Gersaint ) is a painting by the French painter Antoine Watteau . The 163 × 308 cm picture was created in 1720/21. It can be viewed today in Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin .
background
A few months before his death in 1721, Antoine Watteau painted his largest painting, The shop sign of the art dealer Edme Gersaint, in just eight days . A shop advertisement - usually a job for decorative painters - is the main work of an artist who became a member of the venerable Paris Academy in 1717 . The picture was visible to everyone, but at the same time it was exposed to wind and weather and thus to rapid transience. Thanks to Gersaint himself, the circumstances under which the shop sign was painted are particularly well known: “After his return to Paris [...] he (Watteau) came to me to ask me if I wanted to take him in and allow him to make a painting that I could hang outside to warm his fingers, these are his own words; I hesitated about accepting him, as I would much rather keep him busy with something more solid; but when I saw that it would please him, I agreed. The success of the painting is well known; the whole thing was made from life; the poses were so truthful and so natural ... "
The paintings
The shop sign shows the interior of a Parisian art shop, which can be seen from the street and is full of customers. The picture is composed in a brownish tone, with the two female figures setting the color accents. An everyday scene with twelve people is shown. The groups of people in the shop are arranged next to each other like a frieze. They can be read from left to right, because, according to the German art historian Helmut Börsch-Supan , they develop a thought of the painter that emerges in the course of the description of the picture. It starts with the scene with the portrait of Louis XIV , which is packed into a transport box that is to be padded with the straw lying in front of it. A shopkeeper, who is about to put the picture in the box, as well as a second one, who is carrying a mirror past, and a porter waiting to be able to load the box onto his carrier, look down at the picture of the king. The chestpiece replica of Rigaud's famous parade portrait alludes to the name of the shop that Gersaint took over in 1718: “Au Grand Monarque”.
To the right of this scene, a couple enters the shop. The lady in the pink robe seen from the back pauses to take a look at the "wrapping of the king". Your companion leads you with a gesture inside the art shop. Two narrow portrait formats form the background of the couple. Venus and Cupid are shown on the left. Above the two narrow pictures hangs the depiction of the Ovidian story of Pan following the nymph Syrinx . The double door to the right of the couple, which is half open, opens up another room and gives the overall picture depth. This is followed by an elderly couple who look at a large oval picture with women bathing, which could possibly be Diana discovers the Castillo's pregnancy . The man kneels to study the female nudes better, while the dark-clad woman looks at the leaves of a tree. She holds a lorgnon , a reading aid, in her hand so that she can look at the picture better. The art dealer stands next to the picture with the nymphs, holding it with his right hand and pointing at the picture with his left hand in an explanatory gesture. Finally a group of an elegant woman, two men and a saleswoman follow. The seated lady in the striped silk dress with a black cape has her head in profile and forms the counterpart to the figure on the back in the pink dress. All three look in the mirror offered by the seller. In the front right of the picture the dog completes the composition.
The format
The shop sign is now in the form of a painting that was cut vertically into two parts (in the 18th century the two parts were even framed separately from each other). The original format of the painting was 3.55 m wide, today it is 3.06 m. Two rectangular formats should be made from one picture. Since both images were supposed to be the same size, but a division was only possible between the two main groups, an approximately 30 cm wide strip was cut off on the right, a part of which was used again in the top right corner so that it appears 11 cm larger . The painting originally had a rounded top, as can be seen with the naked eye and verified in the painting by Hubert Robert in the Louvre depicting the demolition of the houses on Pont Notre-Dame in 1786. The painting was exhibited at a steep incline under the canopy of the shop and above the shop window. When and by whom it was cropped is unclear, but research has shown that the change was made very soon after the work was done. Jean-Baptiste Pater , Watteau's pupil, is believed to be responsible for this, and he may also have painted the bundle of straw in the foreground on the left, in the place of which was originally a cart loaded with straw. In any case, it seems certain that Watteau painted his work on two separate canvases, with the two parts of the double door representing the dividing line of the composition. X-rays from the Louvre still show the blows of the saber on the right-hand side, which the painting suffered from in 1760 when it was already in Charlottenburg Palace .
The way to Charlottenburg Palace
After the picture had hung over Gersaint's shop door for only 14 days and it “drew the looks of passers-by [...]; and even the most skilful painters came several times to admire it ”- as Gersaint reports - it was bought by Claude Glucq (1674–1748), member of the parliament , and so saved it from the weather-related downfall. The conversion from a shop advertisement with a basket arched upper end to a gallery piece involved a change in format, enlargement and reduction at the same time. Glucq then sold it to his cousin Jean de Jullienne (1686–1766), who owned the shop sign until 1732, when it was engraved by Pierre Aveline. Around 1744 it was acquired by Frederick the Great through the mediation of Friedrich Rudolph Graf von Rothenburg (1710–1751), one of the king's closest confidants. Alvin Beaumont published a note from Seidel, according to which the "two counterparts" had been purchased for 8,000 livres, which Rothenburg and Frederick the Great seemed "exorbitant". The picture found its place in the concert room behind the Golden Gallery in Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin . From 1874 to 1900 the painting “dans le chambre d'Elisabeth, Salon rouge” was in the Berlin City Palace . Today it is back in its original location in the concert room in Charlottenburg Palace.
literature
- Bisci, Patriczia: L'Enseigne de Gersaint. The shop sign of the art dealer Gersaint. Berlin, Antoine Watteau and contemporary art. Konzerthaus Berlin. September 14 - October 5, 1996, Berlin 1996.
- Börsch-Supan, Helmut: Antoine Watteau 1684-1721, Cologne 2000.
- Eckardt, Dorette: Antoine Watteau, Berlin 1969.
- Grasselli, Margaret-Morgan: Watteau, Berlin 1985.
- Hero, Jutta: Antoine Watteau, embarkation for Kythera. Reconciliation of passion and reason, Frankfurt 1985.
- Kühn, Margarete: Charlottenburg Palace, ed. from the German Association for Art History, Berlin 1955.
- Ferdinand Laban : Comments on Watteau's main picture: "L'Enseigne de Gersaint", in: Yearbook of the Prussian Art Collection, Vol. 21, Berlin 1900, pp. 54–59.
- Lauterbach, Iris: Antoine Watteau. 1681-1721, Cologne 2008.
- Wintermute, Alan: Watteau and His World. French Drawing from 1700 to 1750, London 1999.